What is the Mishnah? What is a midrash?

The great repository of Jewish opinion is the Talmud, to which we have already referred. It is a very complex congeries of ceremonial ordinances, moral tales, poetry, philosophy, grounded upon tradition. It forms the text-book of the Rabbinical Jews, and is divided into two parts, the Mishna (repetition, cf. Deuteronomy) or Text, written in a corrupted form of Hebrew, belonging to the second or third century A.C., and the Gemara (completion) or Commentary, written in Aramaic of a developed type, which is referred to the fourth and fifth centuries. The Jews commonly mean by 'Talmud' the Commentary alone, for this is in most esteem: an illustration of the strange but common fact that Commentaries in time override the authority of the Text they profess merely to explain. We may compare amongst the Hindoos the Mitakshara superseding the Institutes of Manu, in Islam the Hedaya being looked to rather than the Koran. So powerfully did the study of the Mishna operate upon the relations between Jews and Christians, that the Emperor Justinian thought fit to issue an edict (Novel 146) in which he enjoined the Jews to use the Scriptures in Greek or other languages, the better to understand them, and to discontinue their employment of the Mishna δευτέρωσις (deuterosis), which he described as 'an invention of men speaking from the earth alone and possessed of nothing divine.' This was in the year 553.

They had occupied the legislative seat, and when their sect started it was with a zeal for the law, which God had given through Moses. Soon, however, they became corrupt. In that part of the Talmud which is called the Mishnah* it is stated that they were to be regarded as if put into that place by Moses himself, taking their places in his seat, and were to be obeyed, so far as outward observations were concerned. (The Talmud is composed of two parts, the Gemara and the Mishna. Mishna means "repetition," and was a repetition of the written law.)

As far as the God given law was concerned and its observances, they were to do and to keep what the Pharisees said. What a wise exhortation this is! He, the King, fully recognized the position they had taken; if He had spoken otherwise, they might have accused Him of inciting the multitudes to riot against their authority. Romans 13:1-7 contains a similar wise exhortation by the Spirit of God for this present age. Against which the Lord warns is their works. There were two great schools among these Pharisees as we stated before; the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai. These were occupied with interpretations of the law. What strange interpretations were given, what tedious burdens were bound upon the people, which God never meant, could easily be illustrated and demonstrated by quotations from that tremendous literary work, the Talmud. "The burdens became intolerable. The blame rested equally on both the great rabbinic schools. For although the school of Hillel was supposed in general to make the yoke lighter, and that of Shammai heavier, yet not only did they agree on many points, but the school of Hillel was not unfrequently even more strict than that of his rival. In truth their differences seem too often only prompted by a spirit of opposition, so that the serious business of religion became in their hands one of rival authority and mere wrangling" (Edersheim). But while they put these burdens upon the people and domineered over them they neither kept them nor did they move a finger to remove them. In connection with this external show of religion, for which the Pharisees stood, the Phylacteries are mentioned. The general Christian reader has little information about the meaning of this word. The word "phylacteries" means "observatories" to keep the remembrance of the Law alive. In different parts of the Pentateuch we read these words, "And thou shalt bind these words for a sign on thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and upon thy gates" (Exod. 13:9-16; Deut. 6:9, etc.). The last named injunction, "Write them upon the posts of thy house," is literally practised by orthodox Jews, by writing these words upon a piece of parchment, inclosing them in a tin box, and this box is nailed on the door posts. From the same words the phylacteries, or tephillin, were instituted. These are two strips of leather to each of which is attached a small box; in these boxes there are likewise pieces of parchment upon which the Hebrew text of Deut. 6:4-8 is written. The one leather strip with this box is wound around the forehead, the box resting in the middle of the forehead, while the second strip is wound around the arm, the left arm, which is nearest to the heart. The ends of this one is made to form the Hebrew letter "shin," which stands for Shaddai, the Almighty. Strange and curious laws are connected with the preparation of the phylacteries, the wearing of them; the rabbinical writings contain much on the phylacteries which is superstitious. Thus the talmudical tract Berachoth declares, "It is necessary to wear the phylacteries nights in the home as they drive away the demons." Orthodox Jews use them as their fathers did, and there is no doubt that the wearing of phylacteries in the twentieth century by strictly orthodox Jews and their belief in them is the same as in the days when our Lord spake these words. It is seen that the phylacteries sprung from a literal interpretation of the above passages in the Pentateuch, an outward religious observance for which there was no foundation whatever in the law. The Lord, however, does not attack this, we believe, ancient custom, but He attacks the habits of the Pharisees to wear the phylacteries and the enlarged borders of their garments (Num. 15:38), so as to be seen of men. They did it all for show; selfishness controlled them and they had no heart for the things of God. They loved the first places, the honor and praise of men; flatterers, they enjoyed and loved to receive honoring salutations from the side of men in market places. "Rabbi, Rabbi," which means teacher or instructor, they loved to be addressed as well as "Abba," which is "father." All these titles simply sprang from their self-seeking. The Lord now gives teaching, telling his hearers that which concerns of course disciples alone, that they are brethren and that they have but one teacher, the Christ Himself; that they should not call man father, but one is their Father, God Himself. The greatest of His own is the One, who is a servant of all. This reaches over into the new dispensation. The instructor, the guide, is the Lord and the Holy Spirit. Alas! how the enemy has succeeded in producing and fostering this distinctive mark of Pharisaism in Christendom, with its man-made institutions, titles, honors, offices and leaderships.

We spoke, in our last article, of the division of Jews into two great classes:— the Hebrews, who spoke or used Aramaic; and the Grecians who spoke and used Greek. The latter seem to have disappeared soon after the publication of christianity. Those who were not absorbed into the church, gave up all their differences with other Jews, and were in no way distinguished from them. There were two centres about which they chiefly congregated. The one was at Tiberias in Galilee, within the Roman Empire; the other at Babylon, without it. At each of these places, schools of theology and literature flourished for many generations. From Tiberias there issued the Mishna, or second law; being in fact those very traditions, reduced to writing, against which our Lord had inveighed. This Mishna being regarded as itself a book to be reverenced; the doctors of Tiberias by degrees collected many notes and comments upon it, which form what is called the Gemara, i.e., supplement. And the Mishna and this gemara together, make up the first talmud (or doctrine) called the Jerusalem talmud, which was completed about the year A.D., 300.

About this time the school at Tiberias was losing its importance, and in its place rose up that of Babylon, where other and far more voluminous comments, making another gemara, were added to the mishna of Tiberias. And these make up the second or Babylon talmud — always meant, when the talmud only is mentioned — which was finished about the year A.D. 500.

We spoke, in our last article, of the division of Jews into two great classes:— the Hebrews, who spoke or used Aramaic; and the Grecians who spoke and used Greek. The latter seem to have disappeared soon after the publication of christianity. Those who were not absorbed into the church, gave up all their differences with other Jews, and were in no way distinguished from them. There were two centres about which they chiefly congregated. The one was at Tiberias in Galilee, within the Roman Empire; the other at Babylon, without it. At each of these places, schools of theology and literature flourished for many generations. From Tiberias there issued the Mishna, or second law; being in fact those very traditions, reduced to writing, against which our Lord had inveighed. This Mishna being regarded as itself a book to be reverenced; the doctors of Tiberias by degrees collected many notes and comments upon it, which form what is called the Gemara, i.e., supplement. And the Mishna and this gemara together, make up the first talmud (or doctrine) called the Jerusalem talmud, which was completed about the year A.D. 300.

About this time the school at Tiberias was losing its importance, and in its place rose up that of Babylon, where other and far more voluminous comments, making another gemara, were added to the mishna of Tiberias. And these make up the second or Babylon talmud — always meant, when the talmud only is mentioned — which was finished about the year A.D. 500.

We are aware that the two questions, the one by the Pharisees and the other, the Lord's counter question in the beginning of the fifteenth chapter, are not fully grasped by many readers of the Word. The Jews believed and still believe (at least, the orthodox) in a written law and in an oral law. This they founded upon Exodus 34:27 and taught that while Moses wrote down a law another oral law was given to him and that this oral law was handed down from generation to generation. It is believed by them that Moses received both the written and the oral law on Mount Sinai. They placed the oral law above the written law. (The words of the scribes are lovely above the words of the law; for the words of the law are light and weighty, but the words of the scribes are all weighty. -- Beracoth.) Circumstances, however, forced them to commit the oral law to writing, which was done in the Talmud (meaning doctrine), from which we can learn all the ridiculous paraphrases and wicked additions to the law the ancients had made under the plea that it was given by God. To illustrate what interpretation they put upon certain statements of the law we select Exodus 34:26: "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk." The oral law has expounded this to mean that it is a sin to eat meat and drink milk at the same time, and the elders have gone so far as to declare, if a pot of milk boils over and some of the milk drops into a pot of meat, the meat is unclean and must be thrown away. Butter, coming from milk, is likewise not to be eaten with meat, etc.

At any rate, the post-captivity state of the Jews might be more truly called poverty-stricken than Puritan; and it was during this dearth, when the house was "empty" and "swept" that it had the "garnishing" of tradition — the ground-work of the Mishna, which is supposed to have been copied by R. Jehuda about the end of the second or the beginning of the third century. This in its turn gave rise to its "complement," or comment, the Gemara, of which two remain: that formed by the school of Tiberias, called the Jerusalem Talmud (one vol. folio), as the larger compilation founded by the school of Babylon is published as the Babylonian Talmud (12 vols. folio). It is hard to see why so great a mountain should be constructed out of matters so commonly known by all who take interest in the sons of Israel and their history. Dr. Edersheim has given a popular yet sufficiently exact compendium of all that most persons will care to know of the subject in his "History of the Jewish nation since the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus" (Edinburgh: Constable; London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1856). The reader will find information both abundant and trustworthy in his pleasantly written book (already recommended in these pages) which sacrifices neither the glory of Christ, nor the truth of the Bible, but blends them with real love to the Jews.

The reviewer next sketches the growth of the vast mass of discussion and exegesis, which followed the collection of the Mishnah, and much of which afterwards entered the Talmud, as the Gemara or commentary on that text: and this in a double form — the Palestinian in East Aramaean toward the end of the fourth century, the Babylonian in West Aramaean which was not closed till about the beginning of the sixth century. But it is natural to tradition to add interminably; and so the Talmud in its turn led to new comments.

Two elements enter here (p. 451) into the apology: first, an apparent measure of shame with the desire to save the Jews from being absolutely tied to the Talmud; secondly, an effort to account by an extraneous cause for the plain fact that nothing else can compete with its authority as regulating the Jews in law and religion. "Only this much we will add, that the Talmud, as such, was never formally accepted by the nation by either General or Special Council. Its legal decisions, as derived from the highest authorities, certainly formed the basis of the religious law, the norm of all future decisions; as undoubtedly the Talmud is the most trustworthy canon of Jewish tradition. But its popularity is much more due to an extraneous cause. During the persecutions against the Jews in the Persian empire, under Jesdegerd II., Firuz, and Kobad, the schools were closed for about eighty years. The living development of the law being stopped, the book obtained a supreme authority, such as had probably never been dreamt of by its author."

The reviewer ingeniously tries to palliate the Haggadistic or legendary part of the Talmud, as poetry, "a thing beloved by women and children and by those still and pensive minds which delight in flowers and in the song of wild birds. The 'Authorities' themselves often enough set their faces against it, repudiated and explained it away. But the people clung to it, and in course of time gave to it and it alone the encyclopaedic name of 'Midrash'." Will this plea stand? Were not the 'Authorities' the authors and compilers and editors of the Haggadah? Did not the writer know that the Talmud itself (chag. 14) applies Isaiah 3:1 to this question, comparing the Halacha to bread and the Haggadah to water, because the latter was even more frequently required, and refreshed more than the former? Their explaining it away is no more than they continually do to scripture: is this too "poetry," a thing beloved by women and children, etc.? It is a perilous task to extenuate man's word, which invariably, though unintentionally and unconsciously, supplants the revelation of God. Scripture became a mere point d'appui, as is notorious for the Halacha and the Haggadah alike. Nor is it correct to say that the authority silently vested in the Talmud belongs exclusively to its legal or Halachistic portion. The Rabbins feigned that God Himself prosecuted their legendary investigations and decided according to their legal determinations. Difference of interpretation only gave occasion to wit; for it was accepted by the sages that diverse comments might legitimately belong to the same text, and one be as right as the other. A wild mysticism was the result, erroneous metaphysics, and absurd physics, false history, and ridiculous geography, heathen myths and spurious morals, by dint of allegorising the letter and literalizing the figure of scripture. Not the fancy of women and children, but the famous R. Gamaliel framed thirty-two exegetical canons for the Haggadah.

Mohammedans, no doubt, discuss this; but at least they believe it. Targums and Talmuds expound or add to the law, add to the prophets; but their authors own what they comment on to be divine. It was reserved for rationalists to exercise their laborious ingenuity, one after another, in expounding and discussing the merits, dates, circumstances of publication, character, object, intentions, style, and import of what they believe to be a priestly and prejudiced imposture.

From such hopes in both Testaments it is a descent to take up the account of Hillel and Akiba striving unsuccessfully to arrange the oral traditions of the Rabbis, or of the equivocal success of Jehuda "the saint," who is said to have reduced them, though still unwritten, to one code about A.D. 200.